Whoever may wander by this blog for the first time needs to know a few things before reading the most recent post:

1. The St. George Theater was and is located halfway up a steep hill in Staten Island, overlooking New York Harbor.

2. Along with my husband and an intrepid staff, I was involved in running that theater for a little less than a year, beginning in April, 1976.

3. Paul (Paulie) Plonski worked for us that year, usually behind the concession.

4. Then, as now, the ships in the harbor, clearly visible from the theater, make their presence known at midnight each New Year’s Eve.

On December 31, 2013, Paulie sent me this reminiscence, written thirty-seven years after the event. I’ve been waiting all this time to share it:

"On December 31, I always reflect on what I consider my most memorable New Year’s. We had a late show at the St. George. You and Dean made sure to get us out of the theater before midnight so we could make it home in time. My ‘68 Pontiac Firebird was parked on Hyatt Street, right in front of the theater. At around 11:30 I got in, started the car, but could not get it into gear. So... at midnight I was on the hill, waiting for a tow truck, the cold wind blowing. I was freezing.

Quiet, except for the wind. At the stroke of midnight the ships in the harbor sounded their whistles and shot off fireworks. It was just me, the wind and the ships with the NYC skyline, a night to remember, to cherish forever.

PS: The New Years party was still raging when I made it home (nothing missed)."

Paulie was a teenager then — now a father of four with vivid memories: the cold, the wind, the fireworks. Privation, exhilaration. These fit my overall experience of running the theater in 1976 and the first few months of 1977. It was going to be a cold cold winter. Although we didn’t know it, we’d be out on the street, broke, by spring. But the theater, while it lasted, was itself a kind of fireworks. I’m glad Paulie made it to the party!

I dedicate this blog post to the historic Russell Theater in Maysville, Kentucky. Many thanks to Betsy Baltzer, artist and resident of Maysville.

A jpg of a gingerbread theater arrived in my email a few days ago, what was conceived as a fantasy pastiche, the Russell Theatre in Maysville, Kentucky. It’s a Spanish “revival” theater, “atmospheric,” which is to say it once offered moving clouds and twinkling stars on its dome — and a lighted rainbow to open and close each show. The vision of Colonel J. Barbour Russell (a prominent citizen of the tiny town of Maysville), the Russell’s facade resembles certain buildings in Cuban-influenced Key West, a romantic contrast to the everyday lives of its patrons.

I have not yet walked through the doors of the Russell, a theater in the process of being saved. My friend, Betsy, a local Maysville artist whose studio is directly across the street from the theater, sent me the picture of the Russell in gingergread, created, apparently, by a group of high school students. The edible Russell will be on display through the holidays in the lobby of Maysville’s Cox building, and will, hopefully, inspire even more residents to chip in to the restoration. So far, the citizen’s committee has: stabilized the roof, restored the marquee and ticket booth, finished asbestos removal, added security doors, completed an architectural study, placed the theater on the National Register of Historic Places, launched a really charming website with “moving” pictures under a tiny ornate proscenium, and so on.

Rosemary Clooney (1928-2002), whose hometown Maysville was, is smiling from a cloud somewhere inside the Russell’s dome. A supporter of early plans to save the Russell, she grew up going to the movies there. Her debut movie, The Stars Are Singing (1953), premiered in Maysville, with a parade in her honor, and the singer kept her connections to Maysville, over a career that spanned six decades.

As a Cincinnatian, I always thought she belonged to us, but I was wrong! Cincinnati was just the “big city” to which she moved when it was time to launch a singing career on WLW Radio. Cincinnati — which saw fit to tear down the RKO Albee in 1977 — could have taken a lesson from Maysville, it seems. Hooray to the Russell Theatre Corporation! More gingerbread theaters, I say! Bring back that illuminated rainbow!

It was Christmas, 1956. I was eight years old, my husband-to-be ten. We didn’t know each other then, but odds are we passed within close proximity, in the gleaming and elegant lobby of Cincinnati’s premier downtown movie palace, the RKO Albee, a 3000-seat velvet-draped wonder. Around the World in 80 Days opened at the Albee that Christmas. It was the big event. Unlike Christmas “blockbusters” these days, epics of the fifties pulled numbers e﻿﻿quivalent to the population of a given city.

In the 1950’s, the question wasn’t “Are you going to see it?” but “When are you going?” Speaking of which, if you've never seen this movie--starring David Niven and Cantinflas (the original, not the 2004 remake), it’s well worth hunting up on Netflix. With a cast of 68,000 extras, shot on location in 112 countries, it cost producer Mike Todd six million dollars to make, an epic of epic proportions, the perfect vehicle for America’s aging but still mostly pristine movie palaces. Six million dollars, by the way, is roughly equivalent to fifty million dollars in today’s bucks. Todd had to sell his production company to finance the film.

Debt and Christmas at the movies, a theme dear to my heart. Let’s move ahead to Christmas Eve, 1976. I’m standing in the lobby of the St. George Theater, the movie palace my husband and I are going broke trying to save. The Albee, back home is closed now, about to be torn down. I can dimly recall how it used to look at Christmas time, with what must have been a twenty-five foot tree in the lobby. The entire building smelled of pine branches. Even the ante-chamber to the ladies powder room had a wreath. The Albee had celebrated a birthday every Christmas Eve, the anniversary of its opening in 1927, but this Christmas I think of it, dark and closed, the center of a demolition battle its advocates will lose.

Meanwhile, here I stand in our barely-heated lobby, pissed, because we can’t even have a wreath behind the concession stand. We’re actually too strapped for cash to buy one, but I had clipped some pine branches and begin decking the halls, the lobby and concession, when our omnipresent fire inspector appears. This was the guy Dean called “the crocodile” — leathery skin, a wide predatory smile. He appears out of nowhere and commands me take it all down.

Meanwhile, showing on our wide stained screen is a low-budget “documentary,” In Search of Noah’s Ark, one in a series of movies whose raison d’etre is to present “scientific” evidence of events depicted in the Bible. Noah’s original ark has been found on Mt. Ararat, or so the documentarian claims. We’d managed to cobble together a deal for a “four wall.” Sunn Pictures, a Utah company, had bought us out for two weeks, so all we had to do was show up and open the doors and the concession stand. The movie drew busloads of Christians, but our regular patrons have stayed home in droves, angry because the theater is suddenly charging three fifty for what are normally buck fifty seats.

Later that night, back home, I make eggnog and decorate my own house with pine branches, and dream of David Niven and his co-star, Cantinflas, drifting over an immaculate white 70-mm screen in a large colorful balloon, slightly removed from worries of day-to-day survival in a decidedly earthbound movie palace.

What exactly is a stand-pipe? Until I ran a movie theater, I had no idea. Typically in New York City, they’re red cylinders, about the height of a footstool, that usually seem to be growing out of the sidewalk like iron two-headed snakes. I have been known to sit on one momentarily to tie a shoe, wait for a late friend or make a cellphone call. The stand pipe that still springs from the pavement in front of what once was our theater caused us a good deal of anguish a long time ago.

Anybody who has ever started up a store-front business knows what it’s like to discover yet one more license or inspection fee necessary to open the doors. Restaurants are famous for this sort of thing: a lot of money flows under and over the table in New York City to secure liquor licenses, sidewalk cafe licenses, and a dozen or so other costly diplomas.

It should have been simple. The concessionaire took care of licensing the candy stand, not to worry. But our stand-pipe system, which connected to the vintage fire hoses folded and waiting behind all those stained-glass FIRE HOSE doors, was a complicated affair. Just days after the theater opened, we found ourselves lacking an official Standpipe Operator, somebody who could take and pass a difficult test, and be knowledgeable about the function of standpipes. There had to be somebody who owned a “Fitness” license which enabled him (could have been a her, but in those days never was) to operate and maintain the system, which actually the fire department was in charge of running anyway.

Who could we find to rise to this task? Our good friend, Thom, happens to have a near-photographic memory and is known for his ability to grasp complex bodies of knowledge quickly and to learn them fully. Thom, if you’re out there and reading this, I tip what was once my theater manager’s cap to you for studying the voluminous texts required and striding right through that test in a single afternoon. And you really knew your stuff-probably still do! In the weeks that followed you proudly produced upon request said license, whenever an inspector came by.

Speaking of licenses, BTW, did you know that theaters — at least in our day — had to pay a marquee tax? Not upon the value or lack of value of the marquee, but because the signage hangs over a public sidewalk. Another regulation, one which was obsolete, from forty years prior, had made sense when film (once actually Celluloid) was highly combustible. The fire extinguisher in the projection booth had to be 24 inches off the floor and strapped to the wall, in order to be closer to the projectors. One Friday afternoon, ours was seen to be six inches too low, and the omnipresent fire inspector wrote us up.

Such was our professional life from April of ‘76 to March ’77. Over the years I have known several restaurant owners, and have always been glad we didn’t try to keep the doors to an eatery open. One sweltering night last summer when all we wanted was a simple meal that we hadn’t had to cook, we sat all evening in the back garden of a favorite restaurant, unable to eat, because the food inspector was on premises and insisted that this spotless establishment prove that their walk-in box was the proper temperature. To determine this, the refrigerator had to be closed — on a Saturday night at 8 P.M. while customers came and went, unserved. Isn’t there an old song from the seventies by Donovan that applies here?

When I go to the movies, I always get popcorn, assuming, that is, that it’s freshly-popped (you can always tell “pre-pop” bagged corn by the absence of a popcorn machine). The saltiness, of course, requires something to wash it down. These days I’m happy with water, but I used to choose root beer or ginger ale or even Coke to drag into the darkness in the long, long years of my movie theater patronage. In those days, once I’d found my seat, the soda had nowhere to go but the floor underneath.

Some time before or after the millennium, cup holders appeared. I was grateful, because I had run a movie house back in 1976. When I set a drink or box of popcorn down on the floor, I knew the probable cost. A cup holder may seem merely an added comfort, but Coke syrup on a hard floor behaves somewhat like Super Glue when it weds itself to spilled popcorn. Only professional steam-cleaning (an eye-popping $2,500 in 1976) succeeded in depriving our burgeoning mouse population of what they no doubt considered several very square meals. Thankfully, our auditorium wasn’t carpeted!

Seats in theaters dedicated to showing movies have diverged, recently, in other ways from the conventional hard-stuffed chairs you still encounter at the opera and other live venues. Premium seats at the movies may have higher backs and perhaps some kind of lumbar support—a little like the chair in my Volvo. Well, going to the movies IS a journey after all.

You need food and drink (what American would buy a car without cup holders?), and you may need—more than your movie-going predecessors did—to be alone in the dark, your own private dream. Note: The title of this blog post is a (mildly ironic) riff on an exciting classic book about movie palaces, The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace, by Ben. M. Hall (1961). I encourage you to find it and read it, if you haven’t already.

Author

Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.